Remembering the local fallen

Saturday

May 25, 2013 at 12:01 AMMay 25, 2013 at 6:34 PM

In communities all across the nation tomorrow, people will gather at cemeteries or monuments or town squares to pause for a few minutes to remember those who have died in our nation’s service against those who have threatened our freedom.

Arlington National Cemetery is, of course, the most recognized of our memorials to the military dead, but all those smaller lesser known sites carry the same memory and significance in our history.

Here in Alamance County we will gather at our own memorial to our war dead in Graham, a memorial that holds the names of all those from this county who died in the wars of this nation dating back to the Civil War.

The memorial was built in the 1990s with donations from the public to provide a lasting monument to those who have given their lives in our defense.

For several years military speakers came to keynote the Memorial Day services at the monument, but in 2006 it was decided to change the ceremony and honor those veterans from our county who had died within the past year. Since then, we have honored 1,684 veterans in the annual programs.

As of this writing, there are 292 on the list for this year.

Alamance County is typical of counties all across our nation who have sent their sons and daughters off to war throughout our history, and of course, many of them have not come home. It was the plan of the War Memorial Committee back in the 1990s that those who died from Alamance County would never be forgotten.

Thus, the memorial was built and those names were chiseled into stone to remain and to be seen by generations to come.

I made a count of the names on the monument this week, and if I am correct, there are 613 men and women remembered there.

The Civil War was a terrible conflict with hundreds of thousands of Americans dead on their own soil. Alamance County lists 236 of its sons who were among those who died in that war.

We had two who were killed in the short Spanish-American War, and in World War I when our local National Guard sent troops to Europe as part of the 30th Infantry Division, the Old Hickory Division, we lost 96 men and women.

World War II took the lives of 220 troops from Alamance County, and the Korean War took 14 more.

The war in Vietnam brought tragedy to 42 families in Alamance County, and I remember more than once having to go to the homes of those families to gather material for a story. Those were difficult assignments, especially in that I knew the young men who had died as well as their parents.

Hiram Strickland was one of those Vietnam casualties, and his story made national news. Hiram, a Southern High School graduate, realized somehow that he was not coming home alive. He wrote a letter telling his family he would not return from his next mission, and in fact he did not. His letter, a heartfelt goodbye to his family, appeared in newspapers all across the country, as well as in Readers Digest.

And the way his family was notified resulted in a change in the way notifications would be done in the future. A taxi driver delivered the news to his family, but outrage followed, and laws were made to the effect that every military death had to be brought to the family in person by a military officer.

Sadly the deaths did not stop with Vietnam. There are three more on the monument after that — two who died in conflicts in the Middle East, and one who died in the attack on the USS Liberty.

Regardless of the war or the circumstances, each name on the monument represents a life given for this nation. There is no way we can ever say “thank you” enough to those young men and women who left behind their homes and the people they loved, who gave up careers and prospects for future happiness in order that we could have the freedom we enjoy today.

No, we can never say thank you, but we can pay our respects to them and to their memory. And tomorrow is a good opportunity to do that while at the same time we honor those veterans who have died in the past year.

The War Memorial is on West Elm Street in front of the court building. Hope to see you there tomorrow at 11 a.m.

Don Bolden is editor emeritus of the Times-News. His column appears every Sunday. He can be contacted at DBolden202@aol.com.

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